“Sounds like another hokey ‘state of nature’ theory of the bucolic past to me. You can bet they were all killing each other and eating their way to oblivion all the way back to Eden.”

“Said the guy airing his gnarly toe claws out in the open air of a city gone back to wild.”

Donny smiled. He let his worries dangle out there with his feet for all the birds and bugs to admire. He spread out his toes. He opened his ears to the sound of the world he thought they had erased.

“I could get used to this,” he said.

“You can start by fixing the mess you already made. Because this is just the beginning. And if we get cut off, it’s all over.”

“I understand,” said Donny.

“Do you? Do you understand this is where real justice comes from? Not courtrooms, or legislatures. Out here, in the fields.”

“Courtrooms are about all I can handle, Percy. You should see me with houseplants.”

“You got off to a pretty good start when you had that land-reform case for Xelina, way back when.”

“You remember that?”

“How could I forget? Basically arguing that all the land in the USA was stolen? Too bad you had to settle it.”

Donny nodded, and looked out over the wetland. “That’s kind of what you are putting into practice here.”

“I didn’t really understand it until the uprising,” said Percy. “When I saw the whole country. Saw what we had done, saw the history laid out there in plain sight, that it finally clicked. How all the injustices I had been fighting my whole life—the vestiges of slavery, the murder and dislocation of indigenous peoples, inequality, exploitation, all the shitty things people do to each other—that all of them are rooted in the damaged relationship we have with the land. All because people are allowed to take from it, to treat it as their exclusive property. The reason people kill for it, enslave each other to work it, and suck every ounce of value they can from it until it’s dead.”

“How do you fix that?”

“You seek justice for it. Value every life, not just ours. Make the case for a different kind of reparations—for the pillaging of the planet, the destruction of wilderness, the rape of the future. Then take what you can win from that, and put it to work on real healing.”

“The only healing we need right now is to bring the people who murdered our friends to justice,” said Donny. “I could use your help, Percy.”

“We both know that doesn’t fix anything,” she said. “This does. You can feel it.”

Donny had a stem of grass in his hand, idly picked as they walked. He pinched off one of the seeds, held it up in his fingers, and wondered if it was the key to justice, or the real key to slavery.